Here's my take.
Spoiler alert, lots of spoilers in here. Don't read ahead if you haven't seen it yet & you don't want details.
The first film is called ‘Unbreakable’; I think this film should have been called 'Unbearable'. Or perhaps ‘Unforgivable’? It’s so weirdly, awkwardly bad. 20 years of anticipation, & M. Night delivers this shit? I haven’t seen a trilogy drop off this much or end this poorly since Chuck / Tito III.
First off, let’s start with the title. The fucking movie is called GLASS, right? And yet, Samuel L. Jackson literally doesn’t say a goddamn word, for the first HOUR of the fucking movie. He spends the entire first half of the film (when he’s even shown) just sitting there, catatonic. What an absolute waste of a great actor, & character. The first film was about the hero Dunn; the second film was about the villain, Crumb. Clearly, this film was supposed to be about the architect behind them both, Mr. Glass; but it really wasn’t. It really kind of isn’t about any of them. In fact, this shitty actress from American Horror Story & Birdbox (who seems to be popping up in every shitty fucking thing lately) is in *more of the movie*, than Mr. Glass is. And she sucks, and her character sucks. Robin Wright, an actual good actress, who was actually relevant to this story, is conspicuously absent from the film.
Which leads to the next major problem with this suckfest: even David Fucking Dunn himself, is barely used to any meaningful extent in this movie. We don’t really flesh his character out any more, at all. Wondering what he’s been up to for the last 20 years? Apparently, next to nothing. Some lazy ‘Dunn Security’ facade is thrown together at the very beginning for just a few minutes, and we’re supposed to believe that he’s just been kinda hanging around, literally walking around the block, stopping the occasional mugger or two. And he still just wears the same poncho to do it, with his face exposed, in the age of cameras everywhere. It’s just goofy as fuck. His son is back, and it’s the same actor - I actually appreciated that, and liked him. He even does a decent job; it’s just that like everyone else, he has been given garbage to work with here.
Most of the film (the vast majority) takes place in the most unrealistic criminal psychiatric institute ever. They have a notorious serial murderer (The Horde) locked up here; and yet, the total staff of the place seems to be: ONE mall cop at the front entrance, and then ONE orderly on duty, and… that’s it? A few random employees, hanging around far away in a basement tunnel? We’re talking about a place where a high-risk inmate’s cell door can be blown off, & people can be killed, and no one notices… for HOURS, upon hours? It’s fucking stupid, terrible writing.
The whole ‘twist’ ending is insultingly bad, as well. A secret group of people, with the same *highly visible* 'I'm in a secret society' tattoo on their wrists, have been, for centuries, looking for superheroes & villains… in order to try & convince them, that they’re not really superheroes & villains, because… yeah this sentence is literally too stupid to finish. Unless your name is M. Night, apparently. And then, it's a good enough idea to hinge your entire legacy of a story on. Maybe the M. stands for ‘I M. a fucking retard’? At best, this was like the worst Twilight Zone episode ever. But not even the original series, that would be too high-quality; more like if there was a Twilight Zone reboot on the SyFy channel. Bad ideas, with mediocre execution.
The only problem is, this wasn't just some random movie: this was supposed to be the follow-up to a truly remarkable film 19 years ago - Unbreakable - and a direct follow-up to a very good film, in SPLIT. This film does not hold a goddamn candle to either one. Not even close. All the directions Shyamalan could have taken the story after all these years, all the ways he could have wrapped it up, and instead he just kind of fucks around half-assed with his characters, and then does next to nothing with them. There are no truly great scenes in this movie; zero. Nothing that takes your breath away, no big moments that will stick with you afterwards, the way there were a bunch in the previous films. Even the little things, that felt huge in Unbreakable - like Dunn’s power of seeing a person’s sins when he touches them - fall completely flat here. We see that power used twice in GLASS, and both times, it is completely underwhelming.
And the saddest part is, all the ingredients were here. Willis, Jackson, McAvoy - all the pieces are right there on the chessboard, ready to be used; but M. Night just had no great ideas on how to use them anymore. There is no great script here, no amazing concepts. He doesn’t delve deeper into ANY of the characters: their best moments are all behind them, in the previous films. The only ‘resolution’ they get is to suddenly die at the end, but there is no great meaning to it. In fact he actually sacrifices the entire combined story of the first two installments, for a dumb twist that had absolutely zero buildup in the previous films.
So the trilogy ends with Shyamalan suddenly killing off the 3 main characters, for the sake of a quick awful twist, that isn’t very fleshed-out, was not all that interesting to begin with, and also is not remotely believable. It’s a cheap, cheesy move, and it doesn’t work on any level. Ironically, GLASS is a bigger disaster than anything Mr. Glass himself could have masterminded.
It doesn’t even match the tone of the previous two films, either. Those films are both dark, gritty, taking place in ‘the real world’; this one is bright, cheesy, & feels fake from beginning to end. Again, it feels more like a SyFy original film or something. This film fails so badly, especially when compared to the original films it attempts to conclude, that I will pretty much just ignore it entirely when I think about Unbreakable, or SPLIT. It’s basically in the same ‘Let’s just pretend this shit didn’t happen’ category as Indiana Jones 4. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not canon; it’s a piece of shit, that should be fired out of a cannon. Preferably, into M. Night’s stupid face.
Other than that, I have no strong feelings on the matter.
